How Obama Created the Greatest Threat to His Presidency

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Here’s the weird thing about Paul
Ryan being named to the Republican presidential ticket: It’s all
part of Barack Obama’s campaign plan -- a plan that’s working
better than his strategists could have hoped. It could also
backfire more disastrously than they have ever imagined.

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time, not long
ago, when Ryan was no better known than Democrat John Spratt of
South Carolina, his predecessor as chairman of the House Budget
Committee. And the Republican Party’s leadership was eager to
keep it that way.

In 2008, Ryan released the first version of his budget, the
“Roadmap for America’s Future.” So while Obama and the Democrats
in 2009 were pushing big plans to stimulate the economy and
reshape the health-care system, Republicans had a big plan of
their own all ready to go.

But as Ryan Lizza recounted in the New Yorker, Republican
leaders “wanted nothing to do with his Roadmap.” Their theory
was that Obama’s agenda was rapidly becoming unpopular, and the
smart strategy was to attack, attack, attack. The dumbest thing
they could do would be to release a grand bit of, shall we say,
“right-wing social engineering” that promised to privatize
Social Security, voucherize Medicare and block grant Medicaid
while eliminating the capital gains tax, ending the tax
deductibility of employer-based health insurance -- and more.

Free Publicity

The Obama team made the same strategic assessment, which is
why, as Obama’s poll numbers dropped, they did everything in
their power to publicize Ryan and his budget. In January 2010,
Obama spoke at a House Republican retreat in Baltimore, where he
couldn’t stop talking up that Paul Ryan guy.

“You study this stuff and take it pretty seriously,” he
said to Ryan. “I think Paul, for example, head of the Budget
Committee, has looked at the budget and has made a serious
proposal,” he said to Representative Jeb Hensarling. He even
gave Ryan personal compliments. “The problem we have sometimes
is a media that responds only to slash-and-burn-style politics.
You don’t get a lot of credit if I say, ‘You know, I think Paul
Ryan’s a pretty sincere guy and has a beautiful family.’” It was
a lovefest.

But it quickly became something else. A few days later,
Obama’s then-budget director (and current Bloomberg View
columnist) Peter Orszag dismantled Ryan’s budget at a news
conference. That set the tenor for the next year, during which
administration aides continued trying to raise Ryan’s profile
and establish his budget as the Republican alternative -- all so
they could destroy it.

Unfortunately for them, Ryan’s profile wasn’t rising fast
enough. So Obama did something very unusual. Typically, sitting
presidents ignore doomed proposals from the minority party. But
on April 13, 2011, with Ryan sitting in the audience, Obama
delivered a searing speech -- perhaps the toughest of his
presidency to that point -- on the subject of Ryan’s budget. He
said it would mean an America that “would be fundamentally
different than what we’ve known throughout our history.” He
called it “a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic.”

The gambit largely worked. The news media devoted more
coverage to Ryan’s budget and, perhaps more important,
Republicans furiously rallied around Ryan. By pitting his
presidency against Ryan and his budget, Obama helped make Ryan
the de facto leader of the Republican Party.

As Mitt Romney emerged as the all-but-certain Republican
presidential nominee, the Obama administration began calling
Ryan’s budget the “Romney-Ryan budget.” Priorities USA, the
Obama-affiliated super-PAC, dedicated its first ad to tying
Romney to Ryan. “Mitt Romney says he’s on the same page as Paul
Ryan, who wrote the plan to essentially end Medicare,” the ad’s
narrator warned.

Unexpected Result

The Obama team never could have predicted that its efforts
would help vault Ryan into the nomination for vice president.
But Ryan is a remarkably talented politician -- so good, in
fact, that he managed to convince Romney and the Republican
Party that the argument the Obama administration pursued so
aggressively is actually an argument that Republicans will win.

The result, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, is that the Obama
administration knew the fight they wanted, and now they’re going
to get it good and hard.

Putting the Ryan budget at the center of the 2012 election
has the tactical benefit of forcing Republicans to defend an
unpopular proposal; more important, it has the long-term
strategic benefit of potentially discrediting the Ryan budget as
a political document. Prior to Ryan joining the ticket, a Romney
loss seemed likely to strengthen the Republican Party’s
conservative wing, because the defeat would be blamed on
Romney’s moderate past. Now, if the Romney-Ryan ticket loses, it
will vindicate skeptics of the party’s rightward shift,
potentially strengthening the party’s moderates. That could
produce a more cooperative opposition for Obama to work with in
a second term.

But if Obama loses, Republicans will have won the
presidency with a mandate to enact a deeply conservative agenda.
Left to his own devices, Romney might have been a relatively
pragmatic and cautious president. Instead, the Obama
administration’s three-year effort to enshrine the Ryan budget
at the heart of the Republican Party would prove to have been a
crucial push toward enacting that budget into law.

(Ezra Klein is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

Today’s highlights: the editors on the messy Medicare debate and
on rejuvenating India’s economic miracle; Jonathan Alter on Paul
Ryan’s gift to Democrats; Caroline Baum on why conservatives
don’t mind meddling in private affairs; Jonathan Mahler on the
U.S. popularity of European soccer; Adam Kirsch on the politics
of personal destruction in “Advise and Consent”; Russell G. Ryan
on giving the Securities and Exchange Commission too much power.